Quarter of Parkinson's sufferers were wrongly diagnosed, says charity

[rvallee]

Poll of more than 2,000 people found 26% of respondents were told they had something else

More than a quarter of people with Parkinson’s disease were initially misdiagnosed, new research has found.

The poll of more than 2,000 people found 26% were first told they had something else, while 21% saw their GP three or more times before being referred to a specialist.

Of those who were misdiagnosed, 48% were given treatment for their nonexistent condition, with 36% receiving medication, 6% undergoing operations or procedures and a further 6% given both medication and operations or procedures.

https://www.theguardian.com/society...sufferers-were-wrongly-diagnosed-says-charity

Katie Goates of Parkinson’s UK said: “Parkinson’s is an incredibly complex condition with more than 40 symptoms, and it affects everyone differently.

It is an actual, current and effective, belief in many corners of medicine that presenting with a large number of symptoms is itself undeniable evidence of psychogenic disorder. This is the natural, guaranteed, outcome of this belief system.

All too familiar:

“One of the biggest challenges for Parkinson’s research is that there is no definitive test for Parkinson’s, and as a result we’ve heard of people being misdiagnosed with anything from a frozen shoulder or anxiety to a stroke.

Psychogenic-obsessed medical guidelines create this outcome, guarantee this outcome:

“I went to the doctors but no one could understand what was wrong with me.

“It took four years of appointments and being told that I was ‘doing it to myself’ before I got my diagnosis.

“In that time I was wrongly diagnosed with a functional neurological disorder and told that the way I was walking was ‘learned behaviour’.

“Our survey has shown that because of this, people are being left in limbo and seeing their health deteriorate, which is unacceptable.

It's way past time to seriously look into the harmful impacts of the various psychosomatic beliefs used in medicine and how they create those negative outcomes. The mantra in the various psychosomatic models, whether BPS, MUS, FND or any other similar nonsense, is that there are no negative impacts whatsoever and therefore zero risks.

This is obviously not only wrong but immoral. The issue is always brushed aside, no one ever wants to look because it will reveal just how massively misguided this hysteria-of-the-gaps ideology has been, amounting to tens of millions of people whose health care was inappropriate because of those irrational beliefs.

Diagnosis remains by far the hardest part of medicine. This idea that diagnosis can safely be done with zero effort and based entirely on beliefs about psychology is an enormous and ongoing failure.

 

[Hoopoe]

Psychology may yet be the key to overcome the problems in the area of functional diagnoses.

If we can find a way for doctors and patients to be more comfortable with admitting they sometimes they just don't know, that it's better to maybe wait and observe for a while, that drug interactions or side effects can cause disease, or that limited money and time is forcing them to ration tests then they can drop this farcical idea of psychogenic illness. Or at least apply with accuracy where it's a correct explanation.

 

[DokaGirl]

The belief barrier can be deadly. When one's physicians "see" a psychological condition where a serious progressive disease actually exists.

 

[alktipping]

surprised they have only a 25% figure for wrong diagnosis since the average is 36% wrong diagnoses across the board any other industry with such failure rates would of course cease to exist . you have to remember the whole medical industry came from charlatans selling hope to the desperate . unfortunately the profession is still full of people assuming knowledge they do not have . I ask why as a so called caring profession that they do not have any branch devoted to increasing research into the rather large areas that have been neglected .